For aspiring students of lottery hermeneutics,
here are some notes that may help. The "236" may
be reinterpreted as a page number in Stevens'sCollected Poems . It then resonates rather nicely
("answers when I ask," "visible and responsive")
with yesterday evening's "434"—

Saturday, May 26, 2012

608 might refer to June 8, the Saint's Day of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
(See the date July 29, 2002, that appeared in an earlier post today
as the publication date of Geometrical Landscapes . In this
journal, a post on that date, "At Random," referred to Hopkins.)

The theory of translation is very rarely— how to put this?— comical. Its mode is elegy, and severe admonishment…. You can never, so runs the elegiac argument, precisely reproduce a line of poetry in another language…. And this elegiac argument has its elegiac myth: the Tower of Babel, where the world's multiplicity of languages is seen as mankind's punishment— condemned to the howlers, the faux amis , the foreign menu apps. Whereas the ideal linguistic state would be the lost universal language of Eden.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

"Educated people— with some exceptions, like Nader— like to explore the senses, and indeed many of your humanities courses (like the one UD ‘s teaching right now about beauty, in which we just read Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” with its famous concluding lines: In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art ) feature artworks and ideas that celebrate sensuality."

Friday, June 17, 2011

This morning's exercise in lottery hermeneutics is unusually difficult.

Yesterday was Bloomsday (the date described in
James Joyce's Ulysses ) and the New York Lottery numbers were…

Midday numbers: 3-digit 181, 4-digit 9219.

Evening numbers: 3-digit 478, 4-digit 6449.

For 181 and 9219, see the following—

"With respect to every event, we must ask
which element has been subjected directly to change."
— Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
(New York, The Philosophical Library, Inc., 1959), page 181

That Saussure page number was referenced in the following thesis
on James Joyce's other major novel, Finnegans Wake—

For some perceptive remarks about Durrell, see thearticle by Nigel Dennis in LIFE magazine's Nov. 21, 1960
issue (with cover noting Kennedy's victory in that year's
presidential election).

All of the above may be viewed as an approach to the aesthetic
problem posed by Dennis in yesterday's Bloomsday post—

"The problem that arises with this sort of writing is
one of form, i.e. , how to make one strong parcel
out of so many differently shaped commodities,
how to impose method on what would otherwise
be madness."

The New York Lottery on Saturday, November 20, 2010: Midday 704, Evening 687.

Here 704 suggests 7/04, the Fourth of July, which in turn suggests this journal's post on that date about random numbers and universal wisdom.

Moving further up on the front page of today's New York Times—

"Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing…. The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”— A worried professor at Harvard Medical School

For that new generation… Live from New York, it's Universal Wisdom! — In other words, 687!

Returning to the lottery hermeneutics (look it up, dudes) of July 4th, we note that a rather arcane and archaic procedure on a Windows PC keyboard— "Num Lock + Alt + 687"— produces the symbol known as a right guillemet — ». This mark, which can stand for "fast forward," may symbolize to the old Slow-Forward Generation the fears of the Harvard professor for the new Differently-Wired Generation.

“When I teach introductory Hebrew, the first word I typically teach is the common noun SHEM. It’s pronounced exactly like our English word ‘shame,’ means almost exactly the opposite, and seems to me to be a key….” — Glen Penton

“Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living. To know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.”

“He looked at the fading light in the western sky and saw Mercury, or perhaps it was Venus, gleaming at him as the evening star.Darkness and light, the old man thought.It is what every hero legend is about. The darkness which is more than death, the light which is love, like our friend Venus here….”

She smiled like sunshine and I learned that she had dimples. She looked sixteen and in her first party dress. “You are very gracious. No, she’s not even a relative. That was many, many years ago.” Her face turned thoughtful. “Would you like to call me ‘Ettarre’?”

“Is that one of your names?”

“It is much like one of them, allowing for different spelling and accent. Or it could be ‘Esther’ just as closely. Or ‘Aster.’ Or even ‘Estrellita.’ ”

Those who prefer to interpret random numbers with the aid of a dictionary (as in Is Nothing Sacred?) may be pleased to note that “heehaw” occurs in Webster’s New World Dictionary, College Edition, 1960, on page 672.

In today’s Washington Post,Richard Harrington informs us that “As a child, Owens worked cotton and maize fields, taking the name Buck from a well-liked mule….”

"One prominent theme which arises in contemporary philosophical hermeneutics (i.e., the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer) is a serious calling into question of scientism. Scientism is the more or less unquestioned belief in the supremacy of the natural sciences when it comes to serving as models of knowledge. By calling scientism into question, hermeneutics is arguing for the legitimacy of (among other things) aesthetic, literary, spiritual, and philosophical knowledge, alongside (but not instead of) scientific knowledge."